Treasure Hunting in Bismarck

First of all i just want to say, part of my job is now to flounder around at sparkling art events surrounded by actual famous people getting their pictures taken, and these photographs are of interest to some people the following day. I usually have bad breath and am hungry, because i’ve been at work for 16 hours. Usually my hair feels greasy or badly cut, and lately i’ve also noticed that new york city is conspiring with my 30’s to make my thrifted outfits look shitey.

I am never sure who’s famous and who is not at these things owing to a conflation of forces working against me:

1. a terrible inability to connect faces and names, and a black hole where ‘human names’ go in my filing system. i do not have this problem with dog names.

2. my vagina

(As an aside i’d like to send out a big “fuck you” to eve enlser, whose absurd, stereotype-affirming early 90’s emotional pornography makes me feel humiliated every time i say “my vagina”.)

The trouble is, it’s such a cliche to complain about fags in the art world. it’s like complaining of the smell of pee in the subway station. i mean, sure, someone should clean it up, but who? i’m not going to volunteer. i was always aware of this problem but recently it’s sticking its big nose in my business.

i’m going to make some giant enveloping statments here, but i’ve found that most gay men get a fucking raging kick in the pants out of snubbing 99% of the vadge-having population, and i’m goddamn sick of it. essentially, they would prefer that you not exist at all, because you’re taking up a square foot of space that could be occupied by ryan mcginley or jake gyllenhaal  whoever. and ok, i’d rather look at jake gyllenhaal than at myself in the mirror, but don’t fucking look at me like i’m menstruating into your cocktail just because i don’t have a weiner. ok?

also: the more money you have, the less like a woman you are. you can polish away all your scabs and sew up all the little tears in your woman suit and mask all of your rich earthy eve-ensler odors with satiny prada pantiliners or whatever. you won’t smell like secret, and you won’t have a little hole in your forever 21 dress from which your thigh is visible, and you will have taken a car service, so you won’t be sweating, and your hairs will all line up in a pleasing arrangement on your head. In other words, art fags are the worst kind of misogynist capitalists and they’re pretending to be members of a subculture somehow!! we must stop them!

This month,

New York

is a nasty mess, but is also quite pleased with itself. This is because the working people are glad that the rich people are gone. The subway is actually a relief, because it’s cold, and therefore retards fragrance, and everything smells bad, especially you. The general street and public real estate isn’t quite as in-demand as it is in October or March, since so many people are off doing whatever you do at a summer home (really, I have no idea. Give grudging, 45-second blowjobs? Eat shrimp wrapped in hundred dollar bills?)

I had this especially uplifting conversation on the subway recently with a hot, world-weary yet still intellectually curious 35 year old lady in a really excellent blouse. She was a teacher. We were sitting across from each other and quietly admiring each other’s outfits. I was wearing a green silk dress with a weird little flower print that has an asymmetrical button placket with little matching silk covered buttons and a tie, off to the side, on the neck. It’s really not as complicated as it sounds, and if I do say so myself, it’s quite hot in a Sean Young in Blade Runner sort of way. *

So we were talking about fashion, cause she swore she had the same dress in high school, and talking about how quick they come back again, because at the ripe old age of 29 I’m already seeing little virgins running around in lace-bottomed Capri leggings which are HAUNTINGLY familiar, and she goes, “you know what I’m *not* doing the second time around though? CLUNKY SHOES!!!” and I was like, “word, and no way in hell am I wearing a BAGGY BLAZER!!!”** Then she goes, “well, I wouldn’t really worry about that. New York is such a femme city, it wouldn’t go over well here”. I was in awe: she was totally right. If you’re a lady in this city, you have to go all the fucking way, there’s no room for  half-assed hair or an outfit from last tuesday. Which means that there’s a lot more beautiful, shoes match the bag match the hair ladies. And a lot more heavy competition. So hot, sleepy-eyed, I know my shit subway lady and I had a sparkly moment. My soul craved her companionship, but we parted ways at 86^th st.

This is turning into a totally different posting than the one I intended, but what I really want to say is, I miss my wife, Emily harris-greene. The Harris-Greenes (Emily and her dog Vinnie) are moving to North Carolina soon. Which is closer to New York, but further psychologically, and my heart is torn in twain. I am at the point where I am actually blistered with jealousy when I see two women walking together, talking shit, picking shit out of each other’s hair, etc. etc. The other day there were these two girls looking SO FINE together in their hot little summer outfits, and one of them was all “ I MEAN, we could be homeys, or whatever, or we could not be homeys, but don’t get the two confused!” and I wanted to jump in and be like “UH HUH!!! Totally honey! Let’s go get mojitos!” but there’s nothing weirder than someone trying to grease her way into your friendship, so I just walked along alone. I feel like such a sketchy character, trying to initiate friendships. Quite a bit more than when trying to sleep with someone, in fact. Everyone is so skeptical, not that I blame them. Who are you, anyway, and why don’t you have your own friends? Oh bitches. I love them and I miss mine.

*I am being pretty grandiose, especially since Sean Young in that movie is pretty much the closest thing I have to a fashion/sexiness icon (ignore the fact that she’s a replicant), except maybe the shoe salesgirl in the “Legs” video, but really, the dress is hot.

** these were also known as ‘boyfriend jackets’, an incredibly heterosexist and depressing term, which I suppose was meant to jazz up the phrase ‘baggy blazer’, which is what they really were. I always felt so impotent, like, oh, if you wear one of those that you bought in the girl’s department, you are either 1. a failure because you don’t have a boyfriend to steal it from or 2. being totally emasculated and disempowered because you’ve somehow settled for a stupid, faux version of the real thing. Like, girls need cute, non-threatening, pared-down simulacra for all things which were originally intended for men. Like, pink razors. How are they different from the grey ones?

I have been thinking a lot about Britney spears, owing to a recent series of IN TOUCH and other magazines of the "celebrity antics" genre which have passed through my bathroom. they add a welcome touch of festivity to my dreary new york days.

in her ‘hit me baby’ days, britney seemed to fit into the scheme of things as a smooth, undisruptive layer added on to past strata of american pop culture. really, nothing could have been LESS notable than a white teenager simulatneously congratulating herself on her virginity, and urging the public to pleasure themselves to her image. britney was remarkable maybe only because her image meshed so perfectly well with contemporary mainstream desires:

clean (smells like fake raspberry fragrance)

tight and hard

golden brown, subtly shimmering with chemical dust

"loves jesus"

condemns sexual expression while egregiously profiting from sexual desire

cannot spell "condemns" or "egregiously"

However, Britney has deviated in an amazing, luscious way from her earlier path. Now we get:

barefoot in gas station bathroom

drunk, marrying some asshole in vegas

cleverly embarassing middle-class feminists by french kissing madonna (a onetime icon, this just highlights M’s failure to do anything meaningful with her power)

legitimizing her hypersexual, filthy relationship with a retarded misogynist by staging an unironic PWT-themed wedding

Squeezing out his offspring as quickly as possible

getting LOADS of DISGUSTING pictures taken of her, which are evidence of her complete lack of interest in her appearance

So I submit: has britney succeeded where punk rock failed? If she can trick americans into believing in her, take all their money, and then return to a noveau riche lifestyle/PWT roots , flaunting her ignorance and lack of "good taste", doesn’t she kind of, um, rule? isn’t she dismantling a lot of the middle class values that punk rock opposed, in an incredibly visible way?

Also, bare feet in a goddamn gas station bathroom? Do even the gnarliest of anarcho-black bandana faced punks do that? that kind of defines hardcore in my book. next up is rubbing your pussy on the floor of the subway. come on britney i fucking dare you!!!

i don’t really understand my sister, but she is a constant source of fascination and the kind of awkward affection that really breaks your heart a little bit. lately she has not been impressed with me. i was putting lights on the xmas tree and asked her how it looked. she said, ‘like a jerk did it’.

you might think she is very small, but in fact, she is 25 years old, six feet tall, and has trouble finding shoes that fit her. she is quite beautiful, owing to her long nose, blue eyes, and different kind of mouth. but i am not allowed to comment upon her lengthy proportions any more. i used to refer to her ‘long body’, as in ‘how does your long body fit on that tiny bed?’. But then one day, she huffed a big sigh and said, ‘kira, please don’t talk about how tall i am any more, because it hurts my feelings’. i said ok. 

we had a time this xmas, i tell you. the first few days were full of ‘like a jerk did it’. we play this really fun game where we feign hatred for each other, or really she just feigns hatred of me, but the catch is, sometimes it’s real! you can never tell when that moment is of crossing over into genuine fury. her eyes get smaller, and she sort of hunches down over the table and grabs her elbows, and starts every sentence using my name like an expletive. but even these signifiers are not enough to really tell. her black eyeliner and long pearl necklaces only further shroud her true intentions.

this xmas, eva was on top of her game. at dinner, i blew macadamia nuts at her and we flipped each other off and mouthed "ASSHOLE" across the table when my mom wasn’t looking.

through all of this, my brother sits passively by, interjecting encouraging commentary from time to time, but mostly just enjoys the spectacle.

while i was in california, we took a little trip down to morro bay to see some relations that we mostly don’t know. as you may know, morro bay is a former beach shantytown which is rapidly becoming a Luxury Destination (in fact it seems like all of california will soon be a Luxury Destination). It is famous for a giant rock which sticks out of the ocean in a really frightening way.

eva and i had a hotel room, and just as i was getting in to bed, i saw a tiny beetle on my pillow. hm, i thought it was sort of odd and funny. i went to go put it down the drain. wait, says eva, that’s a bedbug my friend! i didn’t agree. this was the size of a small ladybug, but brown. ‘that’s a bedbug’, eva insists, ‘i saw a whole thing about them on the discovery channel, they wait until you are going to sleep and then thousands of them COME OUT AND CRAWL ON YOUR BODY’. this efficiently whips me into panic. we tear the beds apart. no further insects. ‘do you want to go to the hotel across the street?’ i ask. ‘only if we see more bedbugs’, eva says. ‘ok, we’ll turn the lights off, and then turn them back on, and then if we see them crawling around, we have to leave’.

just to be sure we get a good view of the beds (and also because i don’t want Them to Touch Me), we stand on top of chairs, in the dark for ten minutes, waiting for the bugs to become comfortable in the darkness and wander out in pursuit of human flesh. we chat in the darkness for a while, then steel ourselves for the light-switching. ‘ready?’ says eva. she is standing by the lightswitch. the lights go on. no bedbugs, no teeming infestation, just plain white sheets.  we wonder if maybe we need bait for the bugs to get interested? as the younger sister, this role would naturally fall to eva, but she declines.

exhausted by our experiment, i am eventually convinced to stay, but in eva’s bed since it is the one in which no bugs were found. we sleep with the lights and t.v. on, hoping the bugs will think we are staying vigilantly awake all night, waiting to crush their tiny bodies. they wisely choose to make no further appearances. ’sleep tight’, eva says, ‘don’t let the bedbugs bite.’ her long body in songbird-print pajamas barely fits on the bed. i sleep with my pants tucked into my socks, just in case.

so do you think brokeback mountain is a queer movie? neither do i. gay, maybe, but definitely not queer. i’m beginning to think, though, that queers should have a little more patience for the gays. and maybe even claim their victories, sometimes, as our own.

of course i  have to start by saying that i find the idea of heath ledger and jake gyllenhaal doin’ it quite uh, distracting. it’s weird how you can have no particular attachment to penises, and still feel yourself blushing at the belts unbuckling scene. (i have trouble typing ‘belts unbuckling’. that’s how effective it was) do i want to be them? no. do i want to do it with them? well, maybe, but then it becomes infinitely less interesting, because then it’s heterosexual. so i don’t know.

here is the queer sentiment i have heard so far about the jake-n-heath love boat: some people think this movie is indeed not the BIG GAY EVENT it is made out to be. why? because

1. the actors aren’t gay, or at all ambiguous about their heterosexuality

2. jake gyllenhaal and everybody else keeps saying "it’s not about gay cowboys, it’s about two people in love"

3. they kiss like twice in the entire movie. (it’s lovely, btw. worth the price of admission)

you know what? at the end of the day, two hot, young, famous actors played fucking GAY COWBOYS and everyone went to see it and critics mostly loved it, and ang lee, who is a genius, directed it. jesus. i mean, can we be happy for 5 fucking seconds before we start staging the traditional queer tantrum?

that being said, i mostly agree with the above complaints. they should have kissed more. their love relationship was less convincing than their sexual attraction.

and it’s not just ‘about two people in love’, it’s about two men in love with each other, and we don’t get to pretend like we don’t live in binary gender land when it suits us. everything is gendered in this country, especially cowboys, and especially when they unbuckle each other’s pants.

nonetheless, if marketability is the sincerest form of capitalist flattery, this is progress in the world as we know it.

then, i was watching the episode of the L word last night where dana and her psycho annoying fiancee are pitching their wedding to corporate sponsors, trying to make money off of the cutting edge concept of their ann taylor white cotton turtleneck love. and i’m having this eye rolling/nausea reaction at the L word’s overt, yet somehow totally apolitical discussion of the commodification of gay culture, but then something weird happened. the fiancee (who i want to kick in the crotch, even more than jenny at this point) goes "after all, it takes balls to break the law". and i was kind of like, huh. i agree.

so if homos want to claw their way out of marginalization through pretty-boy cowboy movies and absolut-sponsored vera wang wedding gowns, should that be ok with me? what do i hate more: capitalism or homophobia? do i have to choose?

1. nice face

1a. other faces are nicer

2. short legs

2a. high heels

3. breast cancer

3a. cigarettes

4. i guess this is all it is

4a. no wait

4b. wait. shit.

4c. it’s something else, oh. rockefeller center christmas tree.

4d. but only very rarely. when least anticipated

4e. and you have no control over it. no control. efforts to the contrary merely reiterate this fact.

5. fuck

6. fuckers with backpacks on when the subway is crowded. claw your face off.

7. calm down, eat something. what did you eat today? jesus. breast cancer.

7a. a type of boredom that engenders a particular kind of nausea that can only be circumvented by obvious pleasures.

8. obvious pleasures

8a. poor judgement. selfishness, defense mechanisms, shame.

9. tenderness

9a. pigeons, babies, drunks, my mom.

ok, i had a romantic dream about 50 cent the other week. which was troubling in and of itself (i didn’t even get to do it with him in the dream, i just worried about what outfit to wear the whole time), but then i watched a 20 minute marathon of his videos on mtv a few days later, and started to feel really embarassed. 50, his arms glistening, gettin it on in the conjugal trailer. or me, the prison nurse, sent in to take his temperature, and wouldn’t you know it, it’s the day i forgot to put panties on.

here’s something really original: i’m a white, middle class, mostly queer lady with the hots for people who are dysfunctional and/or oppressed. especially if they are also fine, and i can help them battle the enemy by serving dinner in 3-inch heels. 

where does this come from? my mom and her girls all worked so hard to be able to wear pants, but now i won’t leave the house without lipstick. how is that fair? at this point i think they expected us to have transcended misogyny to such an extent that we would all be genderless, free-floating beings lovin’ on each other in egalitarian, ‘is it ok for me to touch you here?’ kinds of ways. no one’s supposed to get accidentally pregnant. no one’s supposed to watch porn or nascar, or wear crotchless panties, or mutter resentfully while cooking dinner. what the fuck happened? i guess it turned out that was boring?

i tried basing a relationship on this kind of feminist-backlash ideology, and let me tell you, it was not so fun. and yet, it’s kind of hard to strike a balance  between 50 cent and joni mitchell. there’s just not a lot of overlap there. so i guess eventually you pick one and spend the rest of your life secretly wearing a jeweled thong under your hemp pants, or picking up other people’s beer bottles off the living room floor at 7am.

the mutter museum in philadelphia sounds like something you’d want to see. it has something to do with the philadelphia physicians college, and ostensibly serves educational purposes, but in common parlance, it is referred to as that fucked up place where you go to look 200-year-old dead babies in jars. lots and lots of them.

it also has: wax models of diseased eyes, a very large dried human penis (um, BTW, 11" MUMMIFIED, what was it like when it was attached?), the skeleton of a giant, and the world’s largest human colon, dried and stitched shut around some stuffing (which was put in to simulate its appearance when it contained 41 pounds of its owner’s feces).

it is deeply sad to see these pieces of humans on display, and to feel disgust for them. even the colon was somebody’s colon once, it played an intimate role in a life, and no doubt has a long and complex story to tell. now it is just a thing that people laugh at. only i didn’t laugh because i felt so sad for the man who had it inside of him. it was like a hefty bag, only long and brown. something in his body, some chemical, some molecule, got confused, and then, whoopsies, world’s largest colon. imagine carrying around a hefty bag of your own excrement, and doctors just going "um…i dunno man. i’m out of ideas." eventually it killed him.

i went with my friend tom. we were thankful for our rosy, flexible, well proportioned bodies, free from disease and pretty to look at. also, thank jesus for modern medicine, which for instance can tell if a fetus somehow migrates outside your uterus and lodges itself in your abdominal cavity for a decade, where it turns into a hard mass of tissue and bone the size of a grapefruit.

one way to tell that tom is an extra nice man is that he went to the mutter museum with me despite having been once before. every now and then i’d look over at him and he’d be standing in the middle of the room looking down at the floor, or up at the ceiling, instead of at the exhibits. this is because a lot of this stuff is stuff you don’t want to see more than once.

tom is the sort of man who will drive you to philadelphia after working all night, to look at a dried penis but will somehow keep a sweet disposition despite dumb 18th century one way streets, and will tolerate it when you make him listen to willie nelson. then he will be a precocious smartass, just to even the score.

later, we ate cheesesteaks by the schuykill river and i hoped mine wouldn’t get lodged in my colon forever.

i sort of kept forgetting it was halloween. but i always find that the grownup version of halloween is maybe even better than the kid version, because if you slow down your thought processes for a minute and really want something, you can have it, because any magical powers you might have are suddenly fully manifested. try it next year if you haven’t already. it’s not like a wand-waving kind of harry potter situation, it’s more subtle than that. 

so anyway, yeah, halloween. i was in chinatown at a dungeons and dragons party, which was full of people who are already completely ostracized from attractive mainstream culture anyway. really these are the best sorts of places to be on halloween. **

i managed to completely avoid the prototypical halloween experience, which for for me is usually armchair normativity. it’s when you get to see the full depth of suburban psychological issues on display, which is exciting at first, and then just depressing. thankfully in recent years i have found there has been a decline in the "pimps and hoes" costumes which were so prevalent a decade ago. but for your enjoyment there are still ’slutty cats’, ‘walking boners’, ‘indian princesses’, ‘frat boy trannies’, and ‘drunk guys in plastic masks with puke all over them’.

we could spend hours discussing the various problems rooted in childhood which probably contributed to the selection of these costumes. you know, repressed homosexuality, deep seated self-loathing, exotification of other cultures (not limited to ethnic groups, mind you, i think frat boy tranny is doing basically the same thing as indian princess). but really, let’s talk about our respective halloween costumes and experiences, because, you know, people in glass houses…

last year i was gallagher. i was clinging to a shred of dignity through rather overt self-mockery. like pee wee herman, or kirstie alley, or something. anyway, i was in my ’sad lady clown’ phase.  and i was sure it was going to be hilarious, but i realized i had grown past the point at which i could wander around in drag and feel tough. instead, i just felt ugly. and i got smashed tomato all over myself. my 5 o’clock shadow was really hot though.

my favorite halloween costume was the year i wore a 1970’s shiny orange acrobat swimsuit/leotard with gold sequins. my friend carina had a matching one, and we both wore striped tights with them. it had no real meaning of any kind but we looked magnificent, if i do say so myself. i really enjoy when people interpret costuming as ‘weird, potentially unflattering or sexual in a creepy way’.

also i just choked on my tea and spat it out all over the floor in front of a total stranger. magical powers are definitely over.

** has anyone else recently had the problem of having to distinguish between real and fake dorks? like you say, oh she’s a dork, and someone goes, ‘cool’. and you have to clarify by saying, ‘um, no, really…she’s a dork.’ and you go back and forth until eventually the other person understands you? i think the co-optation of the word dork by people who are actually very cool and attractive does a great disservice to the d&d players and ren-faire goers of the world. you can’t just wear a yarmulke and call it a cute little hat, people. come on. that shit means something to someone.

i’m 29 and i still have 10 square feet of the world to claim as my own, which is contingent upon paying an asshole too much money every month. i’m 29 and i am totally unmoored, unaffiliated, excommunicated, at times deeply troubled, distracted by sex at inappropriate moments, and want to eat bad food.

i’m 29 and i still smoke cigarettes and drink too much. and i think my teeth are getting more crooked.

on the other hand, well, i’m not in the mood for self-aggrandizement. let’s just say it’s not all bad, at least until gravity starts to take its toll.

birthdays (mine is in one week, but i’m prepping for my new number by assuming it a bit early), are not awesome. they force me into the kind of self-assessment that people should really steer clear of. what was i doing a year ago? how have things improved? what did i want to accomplish this year, and, well…you know. it’s bullshit. edited for clarity, a sum up of my last year follows.

firstly, i want to say, i have been as emotionally reckless as i’m likely to ever be. i have been virtually impenetrable, owing to the motto of my 28th year: ‘you can’t hurt me because i’m already dead inside’. it’s not a bad thing. it means you can go anywhere, do anything, get mugged or slapped around, engage in shady business dealings, get rejected from grad school, move to an inhospitable climate, handle family deaths and revisitations from ghosts of the past, be forced to reckon with bad decisions you made years ago….and IT DOESN’T HURT.

the thing is, i figured this out, there is only so much shittiness you can feel, there’s only so much rage and grief. and when you’re maxed out, that’s it! nothing else effects you. but grief abates, as i think i’ve recently mentioned, and when it does, you have to start being careful again because there’s room for more to come along and fill you up the rest of the way.

part 2 is directly related to this. part 2 is, i want to consider the long term implications of my actions when i’m acting them. and i don’t want to consider how every action impacts me. i want to get closer to selflessness, and externality (if that’s a word, and if it makes sense).

part 3 is, i am continually amazed by my family, which is growing all the time, or at least looks different every time i look at it. my aunt marilyn died a few weeks ago. i would like to remember how short her sweet hard life was, and bear her in mind in my actions. i want to keep the unconditional love of my beautiful, and deeply imperfect family in my pocket all the time. i want to wake up every morning remembering it, and go to sleep grateful. i think i started this decade realizing that my parents are as unpredictable and as fucked up as i am, and i’d like to end it having decided to love them for it.

part 4 is, thank you, i love you, and i’m sorry.